the circle ends
by arabellagaleotti
Summary: Mariya Chernov was born 1950, Volgograd, Russia. Maria Collins-Carbonell was also born in March 18th, 1950. She dies at the age of four. Mariya...Mariya does not, exactly. OR, Let's just say...Maria Stark is more than a housewife. A lot more.
1. начало

Mariya Chernov was born 1950, in Volgograd, Russia. Her parents weren't married, not in a relationship, her father didn't know her mothers name, for gods sake. Her father was an Italian businessman, who left as soon as he heard the news, never to be seen again. The other a farmgirl who's hopes of university were dashed with her growing belly. Once born, Mariya was given away, into foster care.

Mariya doesn't remember much of her life Before. Just blurry faces and nondescript rooms, moving around in foster care. She doesn't remember anything of her mother.

When she is four and already showing supreme levels of intelligence, the Red Room acquires another asset.

Two years later, she meets Madame for the first time. She is cold and regal, her features are not particularly beautiful but not particularly ugly. Mariya decides she likes her, right off the bat. Too many people are neutral, she thinks, they shrug and say 'nothing i can do about it, sorry.' Madame is... well, she is cold. Colder than three am with only a ratty blanket for protection, but she is clear about it. You do not walk into a snowstorm blind, after all. It's the midnight freeze that gets you, not the clouds, it's the crystal sky.

"To succeed here," Madame says, voice high and as far as a mother figure that these girls are seeking as she can get, "you must do two things. You must live and you must learn. Live with the cold, live with the death. Live with each other. Learn to fight, learn to lie. Learn to dance. Learn to manipulate. If you do these things, you will be welcomed into the grand halls of Россия ."

The girls nod, frail in their pants and loose shirts, bones still growing, faces still chubby, hair braided. They shift on bare feet, toes flexing against sparring mats.

"Fight," Madame orders, and they do.

They spend all day in the red, in the training room where the mats are plasticy and bright, firetruck red, someone whispers, but Mariya doesn't know what that means. The walls are dark and dusky, as close as black as you can get without crossing over.

"Good," Madame says, as she breaks her first neck. "Again."

She practices her ballet steps every spare moment, she wakes early and practices her moves over and over while still chained to her bed, watching the sun crawl into the windows and along the floor. She doesn't know why she likes it so much, but the easy, repetitive motion calms her mind, gives her a focus that the other girls seem to lack.

Madame looks at her differently than the others, a little warmer, a little colder, a little harsher, a little softer. The other girls do not question, but they do notice.

She is jumped three times in the showers before she kills enough to scare them off.

* * *

There's another girl on the program. She's small but older than the others. Her name is Tatianna. She has reddy-gold hair hair that shines in the light. They smile at each other, sometimes.

In their second and third year, they are allowed free time. It's rare, sporadic, but if they do especially well that day, they have a few hours of something close to relaxation while the others run drills or go on training excursions high in the mountains, where the air freezes your lungs and frost gathers in your hair if you get it wet.

Usually, they would read, there's a sacred bookshelf in the corner of one of the rooms, containing a few texts in Russian and English. Usually they aren't allowed to touch it, but Madame makes an exception for them, the good work they do, their use to the regime.

Other times Tatianna would braid her hair, tight against her head. When the others could not hear, she used to whisper about how her mother taught her, she thinks.

Mariya must have had a mother too.

She, unlike the others, cannot remember anything, not even a whisper of a defined memory. She is blank. Russia is her mother.

Maria imagines her and Tatianna, living in a flat in New York or London or Paris, and sighs with happiness. They would be normal, no Russian accents, no deadly knowledge, thinking red is only a color.

She would be named Ada and Tatianna would be called Madison, normal names, Western names.

One day, she tells her. It's quietly, murmured into the hush of dawn while the others are in the showers. Even in the dim light, she can see her eyes shine with happiness.

From then, on their stolen afternoons, they call each other those names when the others cannot hear. Mariya sometimes closes her eyes and whispers it to herself in her bed when the others asleep and her only grounding point is the handcuffs digging into her wrist. Ada and Madison. Madison and Ada. AdaMadison. MadisonAda.

One day, Madame announces a new training exercise.

They have to kill each other.

They stand in the training room, mats spongy underneath their feet. There are benches like gym bleachers against the wall. They sit there, silent, watching the two standing on the mat. One is shivering with fear. She will die.

The weak always die.

* * *

She dies.

* * *

"You two." Madame's chilling gaze sets on them. Mariya feels frozen in molasses, her heartbeat thuds slow in her ears, each beat echoing like a drum, lasting a thousand seconds. She is scared.

Tatianna looks at her, and she looks back.

They must do it.

The mats are cold against her feet, and the air is frozen in her lungs. Her brain is a rabbit, hunched and quaking with fear. She does not want to kill her.

She will have to.

Tatianna will have to.

They circle around each other, like sharks.

I'm sorry, Mariya mouths, and Tatianna only stares. There is nothing in her gaze but acceptance.

* * *

Tatianna — she, she does not have the precision Mariya does, the balance and focus from her ballet she practices so religiously.

* * *

Friendship is banned in the Red Room.


	2. azrael

There is a man here.

A man.

The girls uproar — well, for them, they do. For anyone else, whispers sweep the room. They cut off when Madame shoots a harsh glare into the crowd.

It's the first time any of them can remember seeing a man, they almost forgot they were out there.

The man stares at them blankly, but something tells Mariya that he doesn't really see. His face is almost like a graveyard, with mausoleum cobwebs in his eyes and the same kind of hushed, blanketing silence that you get surrounded by death.

"This is the Winter Soldier," Madame tells them. "He is here to help you train." This time actual titters rise.

* * *

She's not sure how long he stays, there isn't a clear definition of time in the Red, but it has to be a few months.

He mostly watches, never says anything, demonstrates sometimes. He seems there more for Madame than them.

Madame lets them use him as a dummy, practice their moves on him.

Then, then the fight comes. When they enter the training room, the bleachers are back — the same ones from that dreaded exercise a year or so ago. Mariya still remembers Tatianna. She sits in the same place, just to push a thumb into the bruise.

He is standing on the mat, looking at them with the same dead gaze.

This time, when the first girl tries to practice, he fights back. She is caught off guard, she loses.

The next is more prepared. She still loses.

All of them lose, until it is just Mariya sitting on the bench, a few of the shier girls around her. This is more than a test of physical strength. This is also a test of social. If she stays, Madame will label her as weak, and even if she wins every fight from here to eternity, she will be stuck with that name, with that legacy.

She stands. 

Their fight is faster than the others, not in duration, but in their movements. She can barely see anything but the blur of hands, of her twisting as she tries to take him down. She could almost close her eyes, get buoyed by the adrenaline, let muscle memory take over. It's an electrifying kind of excitement. She flips over his back, pushes him to a knee, places her hands around his neck. He stiffens, makes to move, maybe to hit her, maybe to shove her off her feet, but she twitches her fingers around his pulse point and he stops.

"Well done," Madame says. The fight is won.


	3. the art of emptiness

By the time she is fifteen, it is clear she is the strongest, fastest, smartest.

The other girls have dwindled, only a few are left. They have grown with each other since six, and now, nine years later, they have killed and seen each other kill. They have held hands and hit with those same.

Mariya stares them all down at the graduation ceremony, the death ceremony. Half shall die here. Half shall live here. Half shall close their eyes and only see black. Half will open their eyes and see the greatness of their empire.

The blows are quick and fast, lined with a kind of desperation unseen before today. Mariya ducks and parries, strikes like a snake, and the girl goes down. She finishes the jo b.

She has won.

The empire is great.

* * *

She performs missions for the motherland, so many she can hardly remember.

She loses her virginity to a balding diplomat from Turkmenistan when she is sixteen years old.

After, she sits in her barracks and stares at the bruises on her breasts, on her neck. "Is this service?" She asks herself, and the silence says, "все град Мать Россия."

* * *

Next are assassinations, whether from a sniper's bullet or poison lipstick.

Espionage, where she smiles and uses a fake name and steals and tricks and burns as she flies in the eyes of the nation.

She creeps in glittering balls and long banquets, slips around in the shadows, sends a knife into someone's back with a flick of her fingers, kills another three in the panic.

She crouches on the rooftops of Moscow, waiting for the rebellion leader to step into her line of sight. He does, and is carrying a little girl.

She shoots them both. No need for a vengeful daughter to cause problems later.

She stops another revolt in Hungary by killing the leaders, all eight of them, sending the ranks scattering. She kills another ten or so of the higher-ups, just to make sure. She forgets herself sometimes, gets lost in the haze of red.

* * *

She stands in the grimy, tiled bathroom in some shitty motel that the KGB rented out for her. She just killed a politician, poisoned his wine as he laughed 'with' her. They never laugh with her, it's always at her, even if it's not meant to be. Men laugh at women, especially women made to be laughed at.

Even with the thundering shower behind her, sending steam and water mist into the air, the cold permits everything, down to her bones. She shivers, absentmindedly. She feels numb. Is that normal?

She stares at the fogged-up mirror, condensation dripping off the glass. She reaches forward with one hand, swipes a palm across the glass. Her face comes into view.

She supposes she is beautiful, in the conventional kind of way, young and skinny and smiling. She lips are full, but where they were rosy, they are now tongued beige. Nothing some lipstick won't cover up. Her cheeks are not beaming like they used to be, the apples are not polished and red, plucked from a tree, but rather, withered, forgotten in a fruit bowl. Nothing some blush won't hide.

Still, her hair is dark, curling under her ears. Her eyelashes are long and her eyes are the kind of color that can only be explained through long-winded paragraphs, using many adjectives and frankly too much time, both to read and to write. Let's just say they are brown.

She looks...sad, Mariya thinks.. she's not really sure why, or when, but it's there. Underneath her breath, she chants, все град Мать Россия.

The words echo around her and she closes her eyes.

All hail.

* * *

When she is eighteen, she stands in a field, it smells like grass and nature, above her the sky is blue, there is birdsong and blooms of wildflowers and she can see where children have played in the grass, tracks made from their stamping feet.

This is a happy place, a peaceful place. She would have grown up in a place like this, if her mother had kept her.

She wonders what kind of girl she would be, definitely not who she is. Maybe something, someone softer. Maybe Ada, maybe someone else.

She turns away, and looks at the burning village.

They will be here to pick her up soon.

She can hear helicopter blades.


	4. when things end, something begins

She is sent to infiltrate Svetlana Alliluyeva's closest circle. There are suspicions she is going to defect. She is meant to stop her.

They meet in Moscow, totally by coincidence, of course. Svetlana walking when a mugger bursts out at her, steals her bag. She is thrown to the ground among shouts of outrage. The mugger takes off running. Mariya clotheslines him at the end of the alley and returns her purse.

A month later, they are best friends.

Mariya was drawn in more than expected, by her thoughts and speech and ideas. She's like a flame in night, a mind among mindless, even with who she is, a daughter of Stalin, she is pure of the Russian way. Dirty, she means, dirtied and compromised by Western ideology. Of course, that is what she means.

Svetlana laughs at one of her jokes she had to memorise for any situation, and she feels a kind of warmness in her chest, alien since...forever.

She wonders if this is betraying her country, her mission, but doesn't come up with an answer.

Later that night, after dinner on Svetlana's couch, next to the fireplace with food in their bellies and wine in their hands, Mariya feels the kind of normalcy she's always craved more than anything. She's jeopardize dmissions just to watch a couple wander through a street together, or a mother and daughter look at clothes in a shop window.

Now, here she is, after dinner with a friend, sitting at her place and talking. It is wonderful. She closes her eyes and wishes she and Tatianna could have done this, she would have loved it more than anything, she was more obvious than Mariya about her desire for a normal life. Their friendship was not the only thing she was killed for.

"My father is dead," she says, hushed, quietly, like it's the greatest of secrets. "He has been dead for how many years now? Fourteen? I should be free. Yet, Brajesh is gone, I shall never get him back."

There was silence between them, Svetlana's outburst fading like a firework.

"Then, at least, say goodbye," Mariya whispered, her voice rough.

This is against her orders.

"What do you mean?" Svetlana asked.

"Go to his homeland, just like Russia is for you, India is for him. Scatter his remains, stay there for a while. Learn, live."

She doesn't care.

There was silence. "What if I don't come back?"

Mariya shrugs, "then, I will have to believe you are really free."

"I have a son and a daughter," Svetlana argues weakly.

"I'm sure they will be happy for you. You have given them life, and now, if you want to live yours, they should not stop you."

"You're crazy."

"Crazy, me?" Mariya laughs, high on this combination of late-night air and a dizzying dose of vanilla life, "whoever said!"

Svetlana smiles. "in this regime of oppression? Yes, you are, for even daring to think these things, lest speak them. It's an you are an enigma, smart and minded."

"Shush," Mariya hushes, "fear their ears."

Svetlana reaches for her hand, "come with me," she persuades. "Please."

"Won't it be suspicious? Two women like us?"

" Любовь, you are young enough to be my daughter."

"I do not know," Mariya says, chewing her lip. 'What if we get caught?"

"We will not get caught. Do you know how many flee this place?"

Mariya plummets to earth, she remembers with a sudden bout of clarity who she is, why she was sent her, exactly how telling Svetlana to go is a bad idea. She forgot she was Mariya, got lost in the daydream of Ada.

"No," she dismisses suddenly, extinguishing the warmness between them. "I can't, and neither should you."

"What has spooked you?"

"Who I am, Lana," she says. "Who you are. It's insanity. You'll die."

"Better dead than…" she waves her arm in a vague culmination of everything, "this."

"No, better alive and with your children."

Svetlana signs, looks into the fireplace. "I would like to think I am mentoring you, but I'm afraid you are the one teaching me."

"The mother and the child, indeed."

"Do you want a child?" she asks, and Mariya balls. She has heard rumours, rumours she stubbornly ignored, that all widows get a sterilization done.

She is as fertile as earth. She doesn't know why.

"I do not know," she says, "maybe, one day." It is true, she has watched mothers push their prams or swaddle their babies to their chests, it is a normal part of a normal life, motherhood, but she knows that it will not be allowed inside her mother, Russia.

"Hm," Svetlana hums, looking towards the fire, "It is the most wonderful feeling."

Mariya swallows, "I can imagine."

"Hopefully, maybe, one day, you will not have to," Svetlana parrots, smiling.

"Yes," Mariya smiles.

A week later, Svetlana requests to visit India, release her informal husbands ashes.

Mariya tells them to let her go. She knows why Svetlana is going, and it's more than solving her grief for Brajesh. She doesn't care the consequences.

Another three months, and Svetlana is defected.

svetlana alliluyeva was the daughter of stalin, and she's actually had a really cool life.

she was born in 1926, so a couple years after her father took power. she was married a bunch of times and had a couple kids but that doesn't really matter with what i mentioned:

so, when she met this indian dude Brajesh at hospital, and they fell in love, but he died (cos he was in hospital duh) and she went to india to i dunno. make peace or something? anyway after living there for three months she gave herself in to the indian government. she lived in the UK and america and died a few years ago.

idk man i just like her. like, she caused all this mess when she defected because like Stalin's Daughter ! y'know

THIS IS A BASIC SUMMARY. GO RESEARCH YOURSELF.


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